Donald Trump launched a scorched-
earth bid to salvage his flailing
campaign in a vicious presidential
debate Sunday, vowing to jail rival
Hillary Clinton if he wins the White
House, and accusing her husband of
sexual misconduct.
Before tens of millions of viewers
and a live audience that included
Bill Clinton and three women who
accuse him of past abuse, the
Republican nominee shattered the
last vestiges of political decorum
and gave voice to incendiary
allegations against the former
president.
Trump and Hillary With his
campaign in a tailspin, Trump
apologized for “locker room talk”
in which he bragged about groping
women, but stated baldly that “Bill
Clinton was abusive to women.” “If
you look at Bill Clinton, far worse,”
Trump insisted.
“Mine are words, his was action,”
he said. Going a step further, the
70-year-old real estate mogul
threatened his 2016 Democratic
rival — whom he accused of having
“hate in her heart” — with
imprisonment if he wins the
presidency.
“If I win, I’m going to instruct the
attorney general to get a special
prosecutor to look into your
situation because there’s never
been so many lies, so much
deception,” Trump said.
Hillary Clinton, facing a deeply
wounded candidate with one
month to go before Election Day,
pushed back by saying Trump’s
lewd hot-mic comments merely
showed his true self.
“This is who Donald Trump is, and
the question for us, the question
our country must answer is that
this is not who we are.” When
Clinton said that it was “awfully
good” that someone with Trump’s
temperament was not leading the
nation, he shot back: “Because
you’d be in jail.”
‘Abuse of power’ – President Barack
Obama’s former attorney general,
Eric Holder, led the broad
condemnation of Trump’s threat, as
critics painted him as a dictator in
the making.
“In the USA we do not threaten to
jail political opponents.
@realDonaldTrump said he would.
He is promising to abuse the power
of the office,” Holder said in a
tweet.
Trump was also tarred as
undemocratic by a number of
fellow Republicans. “Winning
candidates don’t threaten to put
opponents in jail,” said former
George W. Bush White House
spokesman Ari Fleischer.
The debate’s opening minutes were
tense, with Trump slinging mud
even at the two moderators, whom
he accused of bias — it was “one
against three” he said — between a
continuous series of interruptions.
Clinton, 68, largely refused to take
the bait, opting to adhere to advice
from First Lady Michelle Obama:
“When they go low, you go high.”
“This is not an ordinary time and
this is not an ordinary election,”
she said, appealing directly to
voters.
But, as in the first debate, she also
laid a series of traps for Trump,
prodding him toward admitting he
had not paid federal income tax in
around two decades.
By accusing Russia of trying to tilt
the 2016 presidential election in
Trump’s favor with a series of
email hacks, Clinton forced her
rival to contradict the intelligence
community, which has also
fingered Moscow. “She doesn’t
know if it’s the Russians doing the
hacking.
Maybe there is no hacking,” he
said. – End game – Trump faces a
make-or-break moment after his
crude boasts, which he made in
2005 and which became public in a
video Friday, as streams of
Republicans have retracted their
support for his campaign.
With a campaign based on earning
free television air time and little
ground game, Trump is dependent
on the Republican Party machinery
to get out the vote.
Party leadership had been deeply
angered by Trump’s misogynistic
remarks, and his own running
mate Mike Pence said they were
indefensible. But on late Sunday
Pence tweeted congratulations to
Trump on his “big debate win” and
said he was “proud” to stand with
him.
In an extraordinary step aimed at
reversing the tide of public
opinion, Trump had convened a
press event just minutes before the
debate that included several women
who accuse Bill Clinton of sexual
harassment and rape — later
invited to attend the debate.
Introduced by Trump as “very
courageous women,” the invited
speakers included Paula Jones, a
former government employee in
Arkansas who sued Bill Clinton for
sexual harassment, and Juanita
Broaddrick, also of Arkansas, who
claims that Clinton raped her in
1978.
But Trump needs a dramatic boost
if he is to claw back ground against
Clinton, who has surged in the polls
since their first debate on
September 26.
Larry Sabato, who heads the Center
for Politics at University of
Virginia, tweeted that “Trump has
done well enough to stop GOP
bleeding.” But Dante Scala, political
science professor at the University
of New Hampshire, said he doubts
Trump can recover.
“I didn’t see enough this evening to
turn things around,” Scala told AFP.
“The news of the last 48 hours will
continue to settle into voter’s minds
and I’m not sure this debate will be
enough in itself to change the
trajectory of the race
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